Best Paid or Free Password Managers

In an age where more and more of our personal information is on the Internet, it’s incredibly important to ensure that you keep secure usernames and passwords. One of the most persistent and dangerous habits among computer users is to use a single username and password for every single website or service. With this setup, it means that if a hacker were to compromise one of your accounts, they would essentially be able to access every one of your accounts, including your bank accounts, your credit cards, your personal and corporate email accounts and other critical accounts. To solve this issue, password managers allow you the convenience of having a single repository for all of your unique passwords. Here are a few of the best:

LastPass – Free/$12 a Year

LastPass is the most popular password manager, and with good reason. LastPass integrates with any platform—from Windows and Mac OS to iPhone and Android—allowing you to keep track of all of your passwords centrally without compromising your security. The cross-platform support is essential for making sure that you have access to your accounts wherever you go. Your passwords are encrypted locally, making it incredibly difficult for hackers to compromise.

KeePass – Free

KeePass is beloved among web communities because of its open source license. That means that KeePass is not only free, but it also has a number of ports for other platforms, such as Linux, Mac, PocketPC, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm and Android. Like LastPass, KeePass encrypts your passwords locally—however, it differs from LastPass in it’s user-friendliness. Out of the box, KeePass won’t have quite the slickness and usability of LastPass, but because of its open source nature, there are scores of extensions and add-ons that make KeePass quite a competitor in the password manager field.

RoboForm – Free/$29.95

RoboForm is the most expensive password manager on this list, but it remains one of the most popular. RoboForm works on a number of platforms and can integrate right into your browser. It can auto-generate secure, unguessable passwords for you as well as auto-fill forms, login fields and of course, passwords. RoboForm also has a more robust list of encryption protocols, which gives you additional layers of security.

Password managers are affordable, convenient and secure. If you download one new app this year, it should be a password manager. By choosing any one of the top password managers on this list, you can rest assured that your data is safe and secure.